Innovation in digital fundraising - top tips pt 2
WPNC’s digital experts?Nesh Soni?- Head of Digital Marketing - and James Allard - Digital Marketing Manager - bring you part two of the latest digital innovations that can turbo-charge your fundraising strategy and solve issues your organisation might be facing.
This is a great way to make the user journey to conversion more ‘human’.
If you already use Facebook and Instagram for your fundraising efforts, harnessing Messenger and WhatsApp can be even more powerful. It’s also a seamless experience because the user information is shared between platforms.
For instance, the potential donor might see a targeted campaign on their Facebook feed along with a CTA button: “Send message.” When the user clicks, they’re taken to the messaging platform where a ready-written request - indicating event registration or an information pack, for instance - is waiting to be sent.
You can then respond with the details they have asked for, or offer further details of relevant events, products and services. With the user receiving notifications of organic messages, this is a great way to build user interaction at an early stage of the fundraising journey, no matter what campaign you’re running.
Building engagement this way appears more human than an ad served on Facebook or Instagram - and certainly more so than another email message to an already crowded inbox (though, of course, email campaigns do have their place!).?
With a better connection established, you’re likely to enjoy a closer relationship with the potential supporter as they continue on their donor journey to conversion. Overall, it’s a great strategy for lead generation in regular giving.
2. As cookies crumble, switch to GA4
As you may be aware, changes to cookies technology is?making it harder to track users?across devices - meaning targeted ads are more difficult to use in many instances. This is particularly true for Apple devices, which are of course used by huge audiences.
Don’t worry, there are ways around this issue. One is to switch to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). We advocate this solution to all charities, brands and other suppliers; not least because Google Analytics 3 no longer processes new data.
The beauty of the way GA4 has been developed is that it integrates directly with all of the major tech and social media platforms: from Twitter and TikTok to YouTube and Facebook.?That means even if a user isn’t trackable between platforms, GA4 can still provide the data either from Google or the platform, so you don’t lose information.
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What’s more, GA4 makes it far easier to track actual user behaviour online: making a purchase or a donation; signing up to a newsletter, and so on. It’s an altogether more holistic view of what’s really happening when the user visits your site, compared to previous session-based data which gave a loose view of activity.
Finally, GA4 now allows predictive modelling, giving accurate representation of user behaviour, demographics and interests that can be extrapolated across entire audiences.
This is just one area of Google’s use of AI that WPNC is committed to exploring and harnessing to build real innovation into online fundraising campaigns.
3. Attribution is better with Meta
This is a second workaround to the cookies problem if you’re advertising on Meta’s platforms.
The?Conversion?API allows you to send web events directly from your server to Meta: whenever a user interacts with your website, it passes the data to Facebook and Instagram on Meta’s Business Suite Platform. You don’t need cookies to do this.
Facebook can read data from Google Analytics 4 (see above), which means you’re afforded a most complete view possible of the user and won’t lose sight of them.
This strategy tends to work best when run in conjunction with Facebook Pixel. It operates the same as a cookie but is stored on Facebook instead. A blend of the Pixel and web events data means Facebook can very accurately provide a picture of user activity.
Marketers can then see in real-time how ads are driving conversions but also confidently make decisions that optimise the content of your campaigns to improve success. This approach can be applied to audiences across fundraising activities and provides a huge amount of information and understanding about how users behave.
Invaluable, innovative, and incumbent on your fundraising and leadership teams to start using as soon as possible, if you aren’t already.
Visit www.wpnc.agency for more top tips!